Review: The Conscience of Nhem En

This was a powerful film with a thought-provoking subject. The director sets up the scale and the ugliness of the genocide carried out under the reign of Khmer Rouge and then introduces us to Nhem En’s foil, an old Khmer Rouge guard who we meet at the site of a mass grave. The guard denies any involvement in the genocide and punctuates his steady but unconvincing denials with an idiotic smile aimed at the camera. In contrast Nhem En is stoic in his admission of being a teenage Khmer Rouge photographer. When we meet Nhem En we’re hit by the enormity and gravity of this story. Here is a man who was there and who was involved and he’s not a pathetic, decrepit aging man but is a man whose relative youth and apparent health make it unlikely that we will be able to sympathize or understand.

The interview with Nhem En leaves us yearning for more. In an attempt to get more out of the photographer the interviewer accuses Nhem En of guilt and tries to get a confession or a reaction out of him but our longing for more is thwarted. Nhem En is recalcitrant. He remains stoic and presents us with bald statements devoid of any emotion. We get a sense that at least for the director Nhem En’s guilt is black and white but perhaps it is not. The question remains unanswered, we are frustrated in getting a better sense of the guilt or of Nhem En’s feelings because we never get to see a finer rendering of the cognitive processes, dissociative processes or emotional processes that might make it possible for a sentient and thoughtful human being to carry on living after having witnessed a massacre. We get no sign that Nhem En has processed his memory of the event or his sense of guilt in any way, so we come away without a sense of his humanity. But if Nhem En is the monster we would at first sight take him to be, then the film does not drive his monstrousness home either. It leaves us with an unsatisfied feeling that we will not get a glimpse of Nhem En’s interiority- that here is this powerful story and we can only just get to know that it exists but learn nothing of its shape or color. We know only the bald facts: that Nhem En actually chose to join Khmer Rouge which he says was a decision based on the need to live and to eat but we are never shown the circumstances that led to his induction in the organization, nor of his position within it. Perhaps at some point in his life he made this decision and kept making it, in fact, he remains closely married to those in power as is demonstrated by the phone calls he receives from the worried officials.

Perhaps the politics of filming in Cambodia and the personality of Nhem En himself make it impossible to get more out of Nhem En but that is what made the film so powerful for me- at the end of the day the conscience of Nhem En is just that, his own conscience, a non physical, unobservable entity- we can only hope and surmise that it is there, guess at what it looks like but we can’t really know it. I suppose in that way the film denies us a pay off except in that the film gives the survivors of S-21 an opportunity to speak for the dead.

I have to say though that I felt frustrated by the structure of the film. The film does not focus on Nhem En, in fact he makes a brief appearance, instead we go wandering after the two survivors who are treated in almost exactly the same way, we follow both of them down the same corridor with the same camera angle, we watch them both laboriously scanning a row of photographs with their fingers until they find the relevant one. They both take us on a tour of the room where they were kept and proceed to carry out a half-hearted reenactment, they both tell almost the same tale. It feels as if there are very few shots to construct the story with.

Nhem En’s interview is frustrating, we get no close ups, not cut aways, we do see him pose with the camera and we watch over his shoulder as he talks uncomfortably on the phone. It feels like the film lack focus, a story about Nhem En’s conscience becomes instead a story about the two survivors and their quest for justice. Our desire for a resolution is thwarted as is our need for insight into Nhem En’s tale. I was left wondering why this was the only short showcased at the archives on Sunday that did not get any audience applause as the credits rolled.